Flak turrets = another lightning turret when paired with gravs?

[Suzera]

Flak is much better for wormhole-bunching since they do AE damage and that's typically where things will more often be bunched up. I could see using a few to protect stuff under FFs from vampires/cutlasses/shredders if they can actually reach now though.

A few missile, basic or sniper turrets are better for "a few blibs" rather than something that is at its best when fighting a couple thousand things at once.

[Red Spot]

Actually never used them at gates, might come as a surpise(ahem), but by reading their stats I thought of them as fairly useless... 

[Suzera]

If you use gravity mk 3s the flak turrets get a decent shot at hitting hundreds if not thousands of ships at once for a shot or two. After that they hit about 10-30 in the tractor fan.

If you luck out and the wave gets bugged into being tractored to a single spot it's pretty neat. Not very reliable though.

[keith.lamothe]

If you use gravity mk 3s the flak turrets get a decent shot at hitting hundreds if not thousands of ships at once for a shot or two. After that they hit about 10-30 in the tractor fan.

If you luck out and the wave gets bugged into being tractored to a single spot it's pretty neat. Not very reliable though.

Flak turret shots can only hit a limited number of targets regardless of the number of ships in the actual area, I think it's 4/5/6 for MkI/II/III. Or is it not working that way?  Grenade launchers and flak guardians use the same mechanic.  It allows decent attack power without totally asymptotic dps in condensed situations.

Lightning turrets are "real aoe" in the infinite target sense.  So are autobombs.

[Suzera]

Looks like it might be hitting quite a few more than that with some quick toying I did yesterday when I saw flak turrets were up for review. I wasn't paying THAT close of attention though since there was no limit specified in the description as far as I recall. They did seem to be hitting circularly for more than 4/5/6 targets unless they were shooting things with no additional explosions on contact. If they are limited in that sense, it certainly wasn't obvious through clown warping 3-4 waves in.

I can try a stricter test of that when I get a chance. Might possibly be a few days though.

[keith.lamothe]

No worries, I think in general what they're doing is roughly what I want them doing, just needed to adjust numbers (notably range)

[Suzera]

It could be that the area damage is picking different targets in the radius so it just LOOKS like they're not target count limited.

Just when I thought flak turrets were starting to look good you have to go and nerf my expectations.

[keith.lamothe]

Haha, that's my job, destroying dreams

But if they're unsatisfactorily un-useful or some such after this next patch, we could look at buffing the simultaneous-target count and/or attack-power, it just depends on what people are wanting in terms of multi-target vs single-target performance.

[Suzera]

It's really hard to both A) get a bunch of units in the same spot so one turret can potentially hit a bunch of units and B) have them few enough to not blow up my single turret before it gets a second shot off BUT, it looks like I may have hit 7-8 fighters sometimes with 1 flak shot, which is above the numbers you put up earlier. It's kind of hard to tell though with lots of time to do fresh waves over and over again.